bennett is an adult, really.

right now i am sitting my bed (wireless keyboard and the mac zoom feature, yeeah yeeeah), it is CHRISTMAS, and i intend to stay up late watching battlestar galactica (just started season 2) so that i wont wake up early tommorow morning and bother my sister. see, every christmas, my brother and i get up around 7 in the morning and wake up the rest of the family so we can open our presents early and maximize time spent having fun. despite routinely going to bed between the hours of 3 and 7 in the morning through most of highschool and college, i STILL wake up early every christmas and find the energy to bother my sister and parents. so hopefully this year ill be over it.

whats weird is i dont really expect to get anything i will actually play with tomorrow. like, at all. im fairly certain i will be getting a hat, maybe a book, some gift cards... if i'm lucky, a wacom intuos 4 will be under the tree in my living room but i'm not really counting on it because it is an expensive gift and i don't expect my parents to spend that much on me. although i'm half afriad they went out and bought on from a retail store and thought theyd found a great price, unwittingly buying me one of the medium or small sized ones, and i will have to mask the disappointment as ponder wther or not to reveal the truth and ask that they return it so i can get one of a larger size. drawing on a 9 x 12 tablet for 6 years has left me a bit biased, so if im getting something new, it needs to be at least a suitable replacement.

but what i'm getting at is there wont be a new videogame system, or new videogames. i'm not waking up early to maximize time spent on my new nintendo 64, or to play whatever great game has come out because when i want a video or system, i buy it myself. but for some reason i have woken up early for nearly twenty years to open and enjoy my presents. maybe i shouldve asked for more toys for christmas?

when my mom asked me to compile a short list of things i might want, i could only think of the expensive items out of my reach, nothing suitable for gifts, and yet later that same week i found myself spending a reasonable amount of money (gift wise) on toys from target. next to me are the nerf marauder longsword, black edition, and nerf n-strike rapid fire cs-36. the marauder i saw on amazon, realized it was even more mastersword than my nerf shadow fury, and had to purchase. the cs-36 i first saw as a gift my 9 year old cousin received during our thanksgiving gift exchange. these are both toys i saw before x-mas, before my mom's email, and wouldve been good as presents, but for some reason i bought them myself instead.

i have this belief, one of the principles i live my life by, and it is this: i am an adult, and it's up to me to decide what that means. i don't have a ball pit (yet) but i love to buy and play with toys on a regular basis because it makes me happy and i have the means to make these purchases now when i didn't as a kid. i guess what im trying to say, because ti be honest i have no idea where i am going with this, is that i don't need an excuse to get fun things. i don't have to wait for a holiday if i want a new toy, video games come out every week and i can just GET THEM. the idea of christmas as this special day when i can receive all the best things is now somewhat archaic because i don't need to wait. anything i would've really wanted for xmas is either out of the price range to give as a gift, or something i have already.

so when i get up later this morning, even if i get the shiny tablet i want, its not like im going to plug it in and draw for hours (well i might a little). if i get dvds of things i haven't got around to pirating, i will enjoy them, but im not going to sit around all day watching them. i doubt i'll get any video games because i have already beat most of the games that came out in november and december has been pretty weak for releases, i mean theres saboteur, but i dont really care. tomorrow will just be a relaxing day off with really good food at the end and some neat things i haven't gotten around to buying myself in the morning, but i still expect to get up with the same excitement i had when i was 7 to bother my family into being up with me so i can enjoy unwrapping the few gifts we have under the tree.

then i will shoot people with the nerf gun i already own, play the zelda game i purchased a few weeks ago, and watch the battlestar galactica i may have downloaded maybe.

actually im going to try and model a low poly character in maya cause ive been really out of practice lately, and maybe wtahc some gnomon dvds, who knows.

bennett discusses the imac 27

i recently purchased a new computer. i wanted something fast, powerful, and ready to rock to use for photoshop, maya, and z brush. so, being an electronics sales person, i happen to know the many virtues of mac products when it comes to computing. i have never purchased an apple product. i had an ipod, for less than a year, that my mom gave me because she couldnt figure out how to use it. i loved it, up until the battery in it died for no good reason and i could no longer charge it. now i'm using a dell jukebox, and mp3 player that may even predate the ipod that i borrowed from an ex girlfriend before she was an ex girlfriend. it still works, despite its clunky, outdated, menu structure. my overall impression was that apple had a good product, but not worth spending money on.

when it comes to computers, i used a few g5 mac towers at school in my filmmaking classes, and occasionally played around on the apple macbook/pros. My girlfriend has one, my best friend has one, theyre fairly common among people in my life and i enjoyed using the simple interface and they really are powerful machines. plus the 27 inch widescreen LED seemed like a nice deal. so i bought one, despite my misgivings on the quality of the user expirience for more than a few hours.

the expirience has been less exciting than i had hoped.

most of my problems have stemmed from the mouse and keyboard, a problem i thought would be easily fixed with a new mouse and keyboard, however, i am now typing on a regular windows style keyboard and have discovered in maya that using the f8 key does nothing. at all. the end and home keys also remain useless, unsuprising because i dont remember seeing them on the original keyboard, but somewhat counter productive when i am writing. most of the keyboard shortcuts i know from zbrush dont work on the mac, and ive yet to find a keyboard layout in any of the menus (the search feature proving pretty much useless) and so have to manually adjust my brush sizes vie the space key instead of a simple click of my brackets. its performance in 3d applications has been somewhat appaling, i had a 3 second load time to rotate a 6 face cube sitting by itself in zero space. maybe i shouldve held out for a better graphics card model.

the mouse also has no middle mouse click, so i cant really use it for navigating maya, and for some reason i bought a really shitty mouse to replace it that i am going to return, it keeps trying to scroll if i dont click down on it directly.

the 27 inch display is quite lovely, vibrant, and has been a nice upgrade over my old, dim-by-comparison- 22 inch screen except for the flickering problem. apperently, in this first generation of new imacs, there is a problem among the 27 inch sized models that causes the screen to flicker, shut off and on, and then pacman down through the bottom of the monitor and back out to top. when i ignored this issue, continuing to go about my business sawn in half and placed atop itself, i discovered that the screen will continue to click around over the course of about 45 minutes and eventually cycle a full circle. this problem is apparently known by the wonderful people at apple who have no idea why it happens and have yet to offer me a valid fix.

having covered the bad things, i have to say i am enjoying the machine itself. when NOT using maya it runs very fast, zbrush didnt seem to crawl too slow and i am hoping if i upgrade to 8+gb of ddr it will increase my performance and stop the slowdown problems i've been having with maya. it works great with photoshop, problems with the keyboard shortcuts, no issues with using high resolution images or running large filters. and for watching movies its great when the screen isnt flickering.

it seems ot handle multitasking well, i generally have several applications open at once. i was able to illustrate an animatic while going back and forth between photoshop and affter effects with oth programs open with no difficulties and the renders go much faster than on my pc. it seems like a really great purchase except for a few slightly major setbacks.

what i would like to do is get bootcamp set up and see how this thing runs with windows 7, because then i wll be able to use my keyboard properly, and enjoy myself a bit more. nothing against the mac OS, its just not what im used to. whne i get around to setting that up, i will probably return to this subject. right now, my feelings are i shouldnt have bought this mac, and just gone for a nice quad-core asus and a samsung led monitor instead.

bennett introduces himself

hi. my name is bennett jobling, and i do things. mostly things like play games and buy toys and generally act like an 8 year old trapped in a body that can legally buy alcohol, so it all evens out. i live in northern california, have an art degree that has helped me get a thrilling job in retail, and a whole lot of aspirations and plans that i can only hope will go somewhere eventually. when trying to productive, i spend my time drawing, 3d modeling, texturing, animating, writing, and planning for a variety of comics, cartoons, and games that will probably never make it past my over active imagination.

when im not being productive, i play videogames, watch movies, cartoons, read books, and usually try and get groups together to play a wide variety of dice based tabletop games, wherein i am most often the dungeon master and everyone has to follow the inane and sadistic whims of my brain. every game bennett DMs is usually in hard mode, because when i play games, i play in hard mode. also i like to challenge people to come up with creative solutions in order to overcome obstacles that cant be tackled by conventional methods.

doing all the things that i do, i like to share my thoughts and opinions on my experiences with people, which is where this blog comes in. i am going to opinion pretty much whatever topic comes to mind. i also might post short stories, or creative musings. im going to be honest, this place is probably go to be a bit random, and maybe ill impose some organization some day. maybe ill also impose some drawings.

anyways, it is 6 in the morning right now, on a tuesday. you might think "oh that bennett rises bright and early, ill bet hes off to a productive day" and if you did, you probably didn't read nay of the previous paragraphs. I'm awake still, in an attempt to reset my sleep cycle, which has been set to put me out at 6 o clock for some reason. so im going to go try and beat spirit tracks, or finish reading diamond age, or both, so ill have something to write about tomorrow.